Adobe InDesign is a desktop publishing software application produced by Adobe Systems. It can be used to create works such as posters, flyers, brochures, magazines, newspapers, and books. InDesign can also publish content suitable for tablet devices in conjunction with Adobe Digital Publishing Suite. Graphic designers and production artists are the principal users, creating and laying out periodical publications, posters, and print media. It also supports export to EPUB and SWF formats to create e-books and digital publications, including digital magazines, and content suitable for consumption on tablet computers. In addition, InDesign supports XML, style sheets, and other coding markup, making it suitable for exporting tagged text content for use in other digital and online formats. The Adobe InCopy word processor uses the same formatting engine as InDesign.

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InDesign is the successor to Adobe PageMaker, which was acquired with the purchase of Aldus in late 1994. By 1998 PageMaker had lost almost the entire professional market to the comparatively feature-richQuarkXPress 3.3, released in 1992, and 4.0, released in 1996. Quark stated its intention to buy out Adobe[3] and to divest the combined company of PageMaker to avoid anti-trust issues.

Adobe rebuffed the offer and instead continued to work on a new page layout application. The project had been started by Aldus and was code-named "Shuksan". It was later code-named "K2" and was released as InDesign 1.0 in 1999.

In 2002, InDesign was the first Mac OS X-native desktop publishing (DTP) software. In version 3 (InDesign CS) it received a boost in distribution by being bundled with Photoshop, Illustrator, and Acrobat in the Creative Suite.

InDesign exports documents in Adobe's Portable Document Format (PDF) and has multilingual support. It was the first DTP application to support Unicode for text processing, advanced typography with OpenTypefonts, advanced transparency features, layout styles, optical margin alignment, and cross-platform scripting using JavaScript.

Later versions of the software introduced new file formats. To support the new features, especially typographic, introduced with InDesign CS, both the program and its document format are not backward-compatible. Instead, InDesign CS2 has the backward-compatible INX (.inx) format, an XML-based document representation. InDesign CS versions updated with the 3.1 April 2005 update can read InDesign CS2-saved files exported to the .inx format. The InDesign Interchange format does not support versions earlier than InDesign CS. With InDesign CS 5, Adobe replaced INX with InDesign Markup Language (IDML), another XML-based document representation.[4]

Adobe developed InDesign CS3 (and Creative Suite 3) as universal binary software compatible with native Intel and PowerPCMac machines in 2007, two years after the announced 2005 schedule, inconveniencing Intel-Mac early-adopters. Adobe CEO Bruce Chizen had announced that "Adobe will be first with a complete line of universal applications".[5] The CS2 Mac version had code tightly integrated to the PPC architecture, and not natively compatible with the Intel processors in Apple's new machines, so porting the products to another platform was more difficult than had been anticipated. Adobe developed the CS3 application integrating Macromedia products (2005), rather than recompiling CS2 and simultaneously developing CS3.

InDesign CS3 initially had a serious compatibility issue with Leopard (Mac OS X v10.5), as Adobe stated: "InDesign CS3 may unexpectedly quit when using the Place, Save, Save As or Export commands using either the OS or Adobe dialog boxes. Unfortunately, there are no workarounds for these known issues."[6] Apple fixed this with their OS X 10.5.4 update.[7]

In October 2005, Adobe released InDesign Server CS2, a modified version of InDesign (without user interface) for Windows and Macintosh server platforms. It does not provide any editing client; rather it is for use by developers in creating client-server solutions with the InDesign plug-in technology.[8] In March 2007 Adobe officially announced Adobe InDesign CS3 Server as part of the Adobe InDesign family.

Newer versions can as a rule open files created by older versions, but the reverse is not true. Current versions can export the InDesign file as an IDML file (InDesign Markup Language), which can be opened by InDesign versions from CS4 upwards; older versions from CS4 down can export to an INX file (InDesign Interchange format).[9][10]

Bi-directional text flow: The notion of right-to-left behavior applies to several objects: Story, paragraph, character and table. It allows mixing right-to-left and left-to-right words, paragraphs and stories in a document. It is possible to change the direction of neutral characters (e.g. / or ?) according to the user's keyboard language.[11]

Table of contents: Provides a set of table of contents titles, one for each supported language. This table is sorted according to the chosen language. InDesign CS4 Middle Eastern versions allows to choose the language of the index title and cross-references.

Indices: Allows creating of a simple keyword index or a somewhat more detailed index of the information in the text using embedded indexing codes. Unlike more sophisticated programs, InDesign is incapable of inserting character style information as part of an index entry (e.g., when indexing book, journal or movie titles). Indices are limited to four levels (top level and three sub-levels). Like tables of contents, indices can be sorted according to the selected language.

Importing and exporting: Can import QuarkXPress files, even using Arabic XT, Arabic Phonyx or Hebrew XPressWay fonts, retaining the layout and content. Includes 50 import/export filters, including a Microsoft Word 97-98-2000 import filter and a plain text import filter.

Reverse layout: Include a reverse layout feature to reverse the layout of a document, when converting a left-to-right document to a right-to-left one or vice versa.

Complex script rendering: InDesign supports Unicode character encoding, with Middle East editions supporting complex text layout for Arabic and Hebrew types of complex script. The underlying Arabic and Hebrew support is present in the Western editions of InDesign CS4, CS5, CS5.5 and CS6, but the user interface is not exposed, so it is difficult to access.